A Board of Elections Goes Digital: Making Democracy Available Online

With any Board of Elections website, the volume of information that’s housed is immense, the groups being served are diverse, and their individual needs are varied. To serve all audiences, we focused on clarity and ease of use. Under the hood, we built a secure infrastructure powerful enough to manage massive datasets and behind-the-scenes processes.

We mapped out a plan that gave the BOE plenty of runway before the 2020 election.

Identifying key stakeholders: The BOE had many different audiences: 18-year-olds voting for the first time, seniors who’ve voted since the Truman era, non-native English speakers, and people with all types of accessibility needs. Planning ahead and brainstorming the best design for all was highly important for this project.

Building reliable, integrated search functionality for large data sets: The BOE’s old site allowed the public to download data for many different queries. Large searches in huge databases would lock up the server and slow down the site. Tackling this issue required elaborate integrations of numerous databases for voter registration, voter locations, candidate information, the county’s voting history, and more.

Supporting transparency in a tense political climate: With national concern about the transparency of election results, the BOE site needed to be reliable. Millions of people in the county and across the world would be looking to the site for clarity. The site needed to withstand big spikes in traffic during concentrated windows of time.

With any Board of Elections website, the volume of information that’s housed is immense, the groups being served are diverse, and their individual needs are varied. To serve all audiences, we focused on clarity and ease of use. Under the hood, we built a secure infrastructure powerful enough to manage massive datasets and behind-the-scenes processes.

We mapped out a plan that gave the BOE plenty of runway before the 2020 election.

Identifying key stakeholders: The BOE had many different audiences: 18-year-olds voting for the first time, seniors who’ve voted since the Truman era, non-native English speakers, and people with all types of accessibility needs. Planning ahead and brainstorming the best design for all was highly important for this project.

Building reliable, integrated search functionality for large data sets: The BOE’s old site allowed the public to download data for many different queries. Large searches in huge databases would lock up the server and slow down the site. Tackling this issue required elaborate integrations of numerous databases for voter registration, voter locations, candidate information, the county’s voting history, and more.

Supporting transparency in a tense political climate: With national concern about the transparency of election results, the BOE site needed to be reliable. Millions of people in the county and across the world would be looking to the site for clarity. The site needed to withstand big spikes in traffic during concentrated windows of time.

Handling terabytes of voter and election data requires serious security. Our technology team worked with the BOE to both modernize their voter databases and optimize the import system for faster, more reliable data updates. We took extra measures to maintain a smooth and secure technical environment.

Understand the data sets and let them interact: There was a big effort to understand the intersection of multiple different data sets and how to synchronize them with the BOE’s voter management system. Our development team built systems that pulled the data from the backend and onto the website in a clear and organized manner.

Bolstering the site for high levels of traffic: Any time there was an election, the site received a big uptick in activity on the site. There is also a flurry of activity in accessing the website’s data. This volume hits the server very hard. We built scalability options into the infrastructure so we could tier up and tier down capacity based on election timelines. On election night and in the days following, people all over the world could access the information they needed without crashing the site.

Enabling fast, heavy-duty querying: The BOE site dealt with a lot of data exporting, particularly during elections. For example, a candidate could download information for voters registered in a certain party living in a specific neighborhood and create a walking list to meet them in the community. This heavy-duty querying and data manipulation was very resource intensive on the server. We optimized the site to cut export time down from 10 minutes to 10 seconds.

Preventing election tampering: Another consideration on the development side was election tampering. We followed state mandates and put technical measures in place to prevent fraud. We implemented Cloudflare to cut down on malicious traffic and monitor the site for hacking.

For each election, poll workers are recruited and properly trained to keep polling locations running smoothly. During the 2020 election, poll worker training could not be traditionally conducted due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Supporting the BOE during the COVID-19 pandemic: When COVID-19 disrupted in-person poll worker training, we created a Learning Management System (LMS) to help the BOE train poll workers remotely and confidently. This LMS allowed them to build out a training curriculum and tracking system that efficiently and effectively educated the county’s poll workers for one of the most unprecedented elections in history. The LMS was a critical piece for making sure elections went well across the county in 2020.

We’re proud to continue our partnership with the Hamilton County BOE, supporting them as state and federal election laws change the requirements for their website offerings.

Updating the voter management system: Recent changes in the BOE’s internal voting system required new backend management to support daily exports of data. We updated the website to properly receive and display the exported information.

Adaptation to changing legal requirements: Recently, the Secretary of State in Ohio, changed certain requirements about absentee ballot statuses. To stay compliant we made website adjustments to support these updates.

Monitoring for bugs and correcting data synchronization: From time to time, we will correct data coming out of the voter management system, making sure the synchronization is functional. We help identify records that are in error or bugs in the import process.

Ongoing technical support to keep the BOE running smoothly: Since the BOE website is crucial for elections and democracy, we are on call for their team 24/7, 365 days a year. This is the highest level of support we provide to clients.